


The Invitation

by Kainosite



Category: The Village (UK TV)
Genre: Class Differences, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 13:35:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13055037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kainosite/pseuds/Kainosite
Summary: In the wake of the sweeping changes at Allingham Hall, Clem and Bairstow renegotiate their relationship.





	The Invitation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Miss_M](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/gifts).



> _We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen._
> 
> ~ D. H. Lawrence

It was a strange feeling, being left behind while Allingham went up to Westminster.

It felt almost like being invalided out, that sense that everyone else was off doing something terribly important just out of sight while Bairstow took his ease in the countryside, sipping lemonade and listening to birdsong. And without the consolation, in this case, of knowing that his enforced idleness had saved him from near-certain death and the trenches swarming with vermin. Well, perhaps the second one, depending on the view you took of politicians.

It had been years since Allingham left him at loose ends like this. Bairstow had come back to Derbyshire alone from time to time on business- that was to say, Allingham’s business, constituency work or the factory- but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d simply been left behind. Back during the war, most likely. What had he done all day? All his memories seemed to place him in the Lamb, nursing a pint and soaking up the gossip. He’d been paid for that? It hardly seemed credible. And now, _now_ Allingham wanted to sack him?

Not that Allingham had actually come out and said, “By all means, sit around on your arse all day at my expense.” Not in so many words. In fact, the phrase “If I can’t sack you, you can bloody well make yourself useful” had put in an appearance. Before he’d stormed back to Westminster in high dudgeon, Allingham had ordered Bairstow over to Sheffield and find out everything he could about the reservoir project. 

Bit of a miscalculation, the reservoir. Come to think of it, he was probably in disgrace over that as well. It might have gone either way; Edmund Allingham was a great one for progress when he could turn a profit on it. But Bairstow had forgotten about that old proprietary instinct of the landed gentry. It wasn’t that Allingham cared, particularly, for the lives and property of his constituents, but they were _his_ serfs, the village was _his_ fiefdom, and damned if he was going to see it underwater.

Bit of a miscalculation all round, in fact, because it seemed the serfs were no keener on the idea than the Allinghams, for all that it promised a decade of work for every able-bodied man. Bill Gibby hadn’t reckoned on that, poor sod. He couldn’t understand it. No collier loved his pit village. They moved around as one mine played out and another opened, following the work wherever it led them, and they would no more have thought to give their loyalty to one wretched huddle of narrow streets and grimy little houses than they would to the owner who’d built them. But these upland farmers were a different breed. Starve on the same patch of muddy ground for two or three hundred years and it seemed you developed an attachment to it.

Hell of a thing to have to campaign on, driving people off their land, and if Gibby wanted to make it a grand project of the Labour Party then good luck to him. Allingham wanted no part of it, and for once his instincts had been sounder than Bairstow’s. Now that he’d seen the reaction of the village Bairstow had no intention of pressuring him. Gibby could try to guilt him over the hazards of poor sanitation all he liked, but there were four prospective sites. It wasn’t a question of them or nothing, it was a question of them or someone else. At the end of the day, rank had its privileges, and if the Home Secretary didn’t want a reservoir on his doorstep he wouldn’t have one. They could put another dam on the Derwent and drown Ashopton instead.

So Bairstow had dutifully gone to Sheffield to look over the proposal and dutifully dropped hints in a few ears that the project might encounter less resistance from senior figures in the Government if they chose another site. The trouble was, it was a day trip at best. By standing a couple of rounds for select members of Sheffield Council, Mr. Gibby definitely not included, Bairstow had managed to spin it into an overnighter, but he’d been back on the nine o’clock train with absolutely nothing to do for the rest of the day- for the rest of the week, for the rest of however long it took for Allingham to return to his senses- but loiter around the house.

It was only a small comfort to learn he hadn’t been the only one abandoned, as he discovered when he came in the door and found Harry breezing down the stairs to breakfast. She seemed far less troubled to be left behind than he was.

“I thought you’d gone back to town,” he said.

“What, to witness the Great Sulk? No thank you. Eddie claims he’ll be terribly busy and he’ll have no time for me, but I think he just wants to throw his tantrum in peace without anyone trying to reason with him. I hope Robert can do something with him, because I can’t.” She laughed. “Besides, I think in these trying times Lady Allingham needs our full support, don’t you?”

“ _Our_ support?”

“Why, with Edmund away you’re the man of the house, Mr. Bairstow!” she said with an insinuating wiggle of her eyebrows, and sauntered away before Bairstow could remind her of the existence of her brother-in-law.

* * *

It seemed a rather harsh judgment on George, but watching him chase his nephew around the pond later that morning Bairstow had to concede that Harry had a point.

It was a bright day early in December, and Caro and George were attempting to teach young Joe how to ride a horse, or more specifically a fat black pony which George had procured from God knew where. This struck Bairstow as a singularly pointless occupation for anyone who could afford a motor car, but the gentry did insist on their little peculiarities. By Allingham standards it was a fairly harmless one. Bairstow was prepared to rate any activity that didn’t result in false arrests, political scandals or attempted suicide as a qualified success. The lessons in equitation seemed to consist mainly of running after Joe clapping and shouting encouragement, and Bairstow was a little concerned the whole affair would end with him having to fish another generation of Allinghams out of the pond, but so far the pony had endured all the fuss with admirable equanimity.

No doubt it was a charming portrait of family harmony, and that was a rare enough sight at Allingham Hall that Bairstow was inclined to savor it, but you did get the impression of three children running about. Even after his unprecedented show of initiative in the trespass trial- not in any positive direction, to be sure, but the man’s marriage had just collapsed, so perhaps some allowances should be made- it was impossible to think of George in the same light as Edmund. There were those like Edmund and Lady Allingham and himself who dictated the course of events, and there were these others, the children, the serfs, the passive recipients of their decisions, who could only throw themselves into ponds and hope for their magnanimity.

It was this that troubled him most about being left behind, perhaps: the thought of being demoted into their ranks after he’d been… what? A man of influence, according to Bill Gibby. Man of the house, according to Harry. He could force Allingham to keep paying his salary, but he couldn’t force him to come asking for advice.

Still, if his stock with his employer had sharply depreciated, it had gone up elsewhere. After he’d been watching the riding lesson for a few minutes Lady Allingham came gliding down the garden steps to join him. She watched her grandson ride around in circles for a while in thoughtful silence and then turned to him.

“I never did thank you for bringing us Joseph,” she said.

Any other time Bairstow might have accepted it as his due, but he was still feeling a bit guilty about his uncharitable thoughts towards George. He waved her off. 

“It was George brought him back.”

“And you who told him where to look. Edmund can’t have been too pleased.”

That was the understatement of the century, but you had to say this for Allingham: he could be discreet when he wanted to be. In front of the others his leave-taking had been terse but perfectly civil. Bairstow doubted a single member of the family or staff had guessed that anything lay between them but a mild disagreement, soon mended.

“You might say that,” he said.

Lady Allingham’s lips thinned.

“I do hope he won’t be difficult about this.”

“He’ll be reight,” Bairstow said. “He’s a little too used to having his own way, that’s all.”

She laughed. “Is he? Isn’t it your job to get it for him?”

“It’s me job to look after his interests, which isn’t quite the same thing. As you well know, being his mother.”

She smiled.

“You will be joining us for dinner, won’t you?”

Bairstow just stared at her, blinking like an idiot. Since he’d moved up to the Big House full time, meals had followed a strict pattern, as rigidly enforced as the terms of a treaty. Indeed, Bairstow suspected that was precisely what it was. At first Lady Allingham had viewed his presence with a certain degree of suspicion and hostility, and Edmund had to undertake delicate negotiations to secure his advisor’s safe passage though her domain.

The results of his diplomacy were these: Bairstow was welcome at the breakfast table, and he could join the family for an informal lunch or take a working lunch with Allingham. When there was a house party he formed part of the complement and came to dinner like any other guest. But he was not invited to the formal Sunday luncheon the Allinghams hosted each week for the local notables, and when they were dining _en famille_ his presence was not wanted. He could take a tray in his room or make his own arrangements in the village as it suited him, but he would not be eating with the family.

These rules had never altered, not for a single meal in the four years he had lived there.

Not that he’d minded his exclusion. “Please come to dinner with my wet brother and his sanctimonious saint of a wife, my mad sister, and my domineering mother.” It wasn’t one of Allingham’s more appealing offers, even if he found some flowery language to dress it up in. No, Bairstow was content where he was.

So content, in fact, that after he’d managed to grasp Lady Allingham’s words his first instinct was to lie.

“I’d been planning to eat at the Lamb,” he said, which was a blatant falsehood- the landlord Peter Baslow was an abysmal cook, and since his wife died fifteen years ago no one ate at the inn who could help it. It was half the reason Bairstow had taken up with Agnes Scrivener in the beginning. Not that Lady Allingham would be in any position to catch him out; the lady of the house didn’t concern herself with such trivialities as where her son’s advisor rustled up his supper. Bairstow just told Mrs. H each morning whether or not he wanted a tray.

But the invitation had been kindly meant, whether she intended it as a reward for services rendered or a counterweight to her son’s anger. Bairstow was regretting his knee-jerk refusal and trying to think of a dignified way to reverse himself when Lady Allingham solved his problem by refusing to take no for answer.

She gave him an arch look.

“Oh, I know you better than that, Mr. Bairstow. You’re Yorkshireman enough not to turn down a free meal.”

And with that, she swept back inside, the question of dinner apparently settled to her satisfaction.

* * *

“You think it’s frivolous,” Lady Allingham said the next day. Bairstow was once again watching young Joe’s riding lesson for want of better occupation, and once again Lay Allingham had come out to join him half an hour before lunch.

“Did I say so?”

What he’d actually been thinking was that they were making right fools of themselves, which wasn’t quite the same thing. To call their current activities frivolous implied he thought there was any prospect of Caro or George putting their time to better use.

“I can see it in your face when you watch them. Let me guess. Something to the effect of ‘His father didn’t die in the war so his son could ride around this estate on a fat little pony’?”

“That’s precisely what he died for.”

Not that Joe Middleton would have thought of it that way. No, no doubt he told himself he was going off to fight for hearth and home, drunkard father and termagant mother and a few acres of muddy land. But he was fighting to preserve all of this, too, even if he hadn’t known it at the time. Bairstow hadn’t quite understood it himself when he volunteered, or even after he’d come back, but watching the progress of the war from Edmund Allingham’s drawing room some things were hard to miss. Death might be the great equalizer, but back home the living had other plans.

“It isn’t, you know. Frivolous. We’re sending him off to war, and I don’t intend to send him there unarmed.”

“Eh?”

“Eton, Mr. Bairstow! In eight months he’ll be off to school, and those boys will tear him apart. I can’t do anything about his accent and I can’t do anything about his father, but I can make sure he goes there armed with all the skills of a country gentleman. He’ll know how to ride and shoot as well as any of the little bastards before I’m through.”

She had the air of Boadicea riding into battle, and it was tempting to laugh at the absurdity of it, all this melodrama over one little boy, but somehow her sincerity made it impossible. It was all rubbish, bloodlines and the honor of the family name and all the rest of it, but she cared about it so deeply that it almost started to feel real.

Besides, kids were little shits. Poor Joe probably _would_ need all the help he could get.

“George can’t teach him to shoot.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not trying to recruit you. Harry has volunteered her services.” Lady Allingham sighed and glanced back at the house. “I hope this time she’ll spare the masonry.”

“I thought she didn’t care for children.”

“She says doesn’t mind other people’s, in small doses. Although she tells me, and this is an exact quote, that Joseph will be more amusing once he stops gaping at everything like a dead codfish.”

Bairstow snorted. “She’s not wrong. You might have a go at curing that before you send him off to Eton as well.”

“Time is the only remedy for that, I’m afraid. I wish we had more of it. It’s very hard on a mother to lose them for so much of the year, and Caro has never been strong.”

Strong enough to get her son back, Bairstow thought, but he kept that observation to himself. It didn’t seem to be the sort of conversation that required much participation on his end, for Lady Allingham went on, lost in memory,

“They had a horrid time at school, my boys. George especially. Edmund… adjusted, but poor George… George never did. He used to cry at the end of every holiday when we had to send him back. He tried to hide it from us when he got older, but a mother always knows these things. But it’s what you do, isn’t it? You send them away. You can’t protect them no matter how much you want to.

“I sometimes wonder if that’s why- If we’ve been too isolated here, if that lies at the heart of all these tragedies that have been visited upon us. But they were so badly hurt. When I finally got them back, I thought that if only I could keep them here, I could keep us all safe, I could stop anything else from happening.”

“The world has a nasty habit of intruding on our private plans.”

“So it does.” She glanced over at him and smiled sadly. “Though not everything that has come to us from the outside has been evil.”

* * *

“He’s very like her, isn’t he?”

Another bright winter morning, sunlight gleaming on two shining golden heads as Joe attempted to teach his mother the rudiments of football. It was too cold today to stand about outside for any length of time, so Bairstow and Lady Allingham were watching them from the drawing room.

He wasn’t quite sure how he’d ended up as Lady Allingham’s designated confidant on the subject of The Grandchild. Lack of alternatives, most likely. Edmund had pointedly taken himself out of the picture, George was still in disgrace over the housemaid incident, and although Harry had shown remarkable patience with the whole affair Lady Allingham had the sense not to push her too far. Caro would have been glad to talk about him- Caro spoke of nothing else, if she could help it- but perhaps it was an awkward subject for mother and daughter to broach, under the circumstances.

Whatever the reason, the role seemed to have fallen on him. It was becoming a routine. Around half eleven Lady Allingham would come find him, and they’d chat until everyone gathered for lunch. He’d tried vanishing into obscure corners of the house a few times, just to see what she would do, but she ferreted him out wherever he was hiding.

It was the Middleton lad the boy favored, in Bairstow’s opinion, but it struck him as impolitic to say so. He murmured a polite affirmation.

“But the one he really reminds me of is Edmund, when he was small. Sometimes he tilts his head in a certain way and it’s like I’ve been transported back thirty years. Oh yes,” she said, when Bairstow turned to her incredulously. “You wouldn’t know it now, but Edmund was such a cheerful little boy. Then he went away to school, and… well, I told you, they had a bad time of it, he and George. He was different when he came back. Solemn.” She smiled wryly. ”Pompous.”

“Convinced of his own importance.”

“Yes. But that isn’t his fault, not really.”

Some of Bairstow’s skepticism must have showed on his face, for she went on,

“His father had never been much help to us. There was some part of him that never came back from Africa, you see. He couldn’t… he couldn’t be relied upon. The management of the estate, the household, the children, it all fell to me. And by then, by the time Edmund went away to school, his father was hardly there. He was like a sort of ghost, haunting us. And you can’t ask a ghost to look over the accounts, can you?”

“They’re not known for paperwork, no.”

“I was very much alone, in every sense that mattered. Edmund felt that keenly, I think. He felt an obligation, a responsibility to take his father’s place. To be the head of the household. At eleven years old! Can you imagine?”

“My own father died when I was a baby. It was just me and me mother and me sister, growing up.”

“Then you can. I don’t think he thought of it before, because it was just the five of us; we were his whole world. He didn’t know there was any other way to live. But when he went to school, he saw the wider world, the real world, for the first time, and it was run by men. Not by people’s mothers. And so quite naturally he thought he had a duty to us, to me, to assume that role." She sighed. "He means it for the best. But it’s distorting; it sends everything out of balance. A child can't take the place of a husband. For him to wield that authority over his siblings, to try to wield it over me-”

"Not that he's had much success there, as far as I can make out."

"I am still his mother. But it breeds conflict within the family, and it makes Edmund hard, overbearing at times... I suppose it's what one wants, in a Home Secretary."

"There have been times when he could stand to be more flexible," Bairstow allowed. "But he's a gifted politician, your son. I'd never have stuck to him so long otherwise."

* * *

Two weeks gone, and still no word from Allingham. Bairstow had decided to take matters into his own hands. There were always things that wanted doing if you looked hard enough, things that had been set aside and put off in favor of more urgent business. For instance: trawling through Hansard for old speeches by prominent members of the opposition in which they had said things they might come to regret.

Which explained why he was spending a lovely winter’s day buried in the Allinghams’ library behind a mound of books, reading a debate about wool production. Christ but these Liberals were dull as dirt.

Angel of mercy that she was, Lady Allingham showed up half an hour early for their daily _tête-à-tête_.

“No riding lesson today?” Bairstow asked, setting aside his project with relief.

She shook her head.

“Harriet has taken Caro and Joseph for a drive. They invited me along but I thought that on the whole I might prefer to digest my breakfast.”

“As opposed to scattering it over a few dozen miles of countryside, you mean?” There were a lot of steep roads in the Dales, and Harry was a fast driver.

Lady Allingham did not dignify this with an answer, but she smiled. Bairstow raised an eyebrow.

“If I didn’t know better, I might start to think you liked my company.”

“I came for a book, Mr. Bairstow. This _is_ the library.”

“Jane Austen again?”

“Recent events have rather put me off the topic of happy marriages. No, I was thinking of something a little darker. _Vanity Fair_ , perhaps, if I can find where we shelved it. George and Caro have a vexing habit of putting things back at random.”

“Well, if you can’t find it there’s always Hansard,” said Bairstow, raising the current volume in salute.

She huffed a dry little laugh. “I hear quite enough of Edmund’s speeches in person, thank you.”

It struck Bairstow that chivalry demanded he help her look for her book. With a little luck, the library might be in such a grave state of disorder that this task could occupy them both all the way up until lunchtime, and Herbert Fisher’s thoughts on animal husbandry would have to wait for the afternoon. He levered himself to his feet.

“I’ll lend you a hand, then.”

Lady Allingham gave him an arch look that suggested she knew exactly what he was playing at, but all she said was, “How kind. You take that side, and I’ll take this?”

Bairstow’s shelves seemed to contain atlases and nonfiction ranging from Thucydides to a thick book on the ailments of sheep which the right honorable Mr. Fisher would no doubt find riveting. He found a misshelved volume of Shakespeare and a copy of _The Count of Monte Cristo_ which someone had decided to class with France rather than Dumas, but on the whole it did not strike him as promising ground in which to look for modern novels. Then again, since his goal was not to find the book but rather to fail to find the book for as long as possible, perhaps it paid to make an exhaustive search.

In the end it was fortunate that he did, because Thackeray’s magnum opus had inexplicably been stuffed in beside Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall_. Well, he was some good to someone, at least, even if Allingham had no use for him. He limped over to Lady Allingham and passed her the first volume.

“The object of your quest.”

She laughed. “You make it sound like the Holy Grail.”

“For which I have passed through many perils, including the fall of the Roman Empire and the many diseases of the domestic sheep. Do I get a reward?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“A favor is traditional, I think. Your handkerchief?”

Lady Allingham smiled. “Or a kiss.”

She was teasing, or she meant to give him a peck on the cheek, and he knew it. But she was standing very close, and he was filled with something, a churning frustration at this long useless inaction Allingham had imposed upon him or the need to prove to himself that he was something to somebody. Before he could think better of it, he pulled her to him and kissed her full on the lips.

She stiffened, and then eased into it for just a moment before she shoved him away with both hands, the spine of the book digging into his chest. They were both breathing hard- not from the kiss; it hadn’t lasted long enough for that, but from the shock of it. Her free hand hung suspended in the air, and he wasn’t sure whether she meant to slap him or grab his tie and pull him in for another kiss. But she just looked at him, regal as ever, her face unreadable, and after a time she let her hand drop.

Whatever she’d taken from it, it wasn’t mortal offense. A faint smiled still played about her lips.

“You do have a high opinion of yourself, Mr. Bairstow,” she said.

“Am I wrong? Tell me I’m wrong and I’ll never touch you again. But you said it yourself the other day- you’ve been alone for far too long.”

She shook her head slightly- not in disagreement, he thought, but in denial of the terms of engagement- and walked out of the room without a word.

“Lady Allingham this, Lady Allingham that- there’s no one in the world calls you by your right name. Aren’t you tired of it?” Bairstow called after her, but while she paused for a moment in the doorway, silhouetted against the sunlit wall of the corridor like a perfect nineteenth century fashion plate, she didn’t turn around.

* * *

Lady Allingham failed to appear at lunch- a headache, claimed Sarah the housemaid- and as Bairstow sat in the library all afternoon poring over dull parliamentary records he wondered whether he’d got himself disinvited from dinner, but the dressing gong rang without a word from anyone. Nothing from herself, not even a hint from George or Mrs. H, who were usually the poor sods deputized for such unpleasant duties. Well then, in the absence of further instructions he’d turn up just as usual, and Lady Allingham could make of it what she would. If there wasn’t a plate laid she had only herself to blame for any ensuing awkwardness. 

She put an end to these anxieties by showing up in his bedroom halfway through his toilet. Bairstow was struggling with his tie. The bloody thing refused to hang straight and he’d been wrestling with it in the mirror for about fifteen minutes to absolutely no avail. Absurd custom, all this dressing and undressing for things. Small wonder the aristocracy needed other people to do all their work for them; there wasn’t enough time in the day to do anything else but change their clothes, although of course if you were properly posh there were servants to look after that as well.

Bairstow lacked a valet, but he might have hoped for some help from the lady of the house. She laid her hands on his shoulders and smiled at him over his head in the mirror, but made no offer to help with the tie.

“If we’re going to do this there have to be rules,” she said.

“Oh, aye?” Bairstow asked, finally managing to tug the damn thing straight.

“I won’t have us made the subject of common gossip. It’s not fair to Edmund.”

“To _Edmund_? Lady Allingham-“

“Clem.”

He glanced up at her over his shoulder. She smiled.

“You were right. I am tired of it.”

“Clem, then. If it comes out that the Home Secretary’s mother is having an affair with his political advisor, who do you think will have the pleasure of cleaning up the scandal? Not Edmund. I can assure you, there is no one keener to keep this out of the public eye than I.”

“So you understand. When we’re in public, you must be my son’s political advisor, nothing more. And within the family…”

Bairstow had been thinking over this as well, as he passed from the wool debate to prison reform and steel tariffs.

“George won’t talk, Edmund certainly won’t. Harry is fond of you and it’s not in her interests to leak. Joe doesn’t strike me as a particularly perceptive child, and anyway he’ll be away at school from next year. Caro’s a problem. Can we trust her not blurt it out?”

“Caro can be surprisingly good at keeping secrets when it matters. You’d be astonished how few people know about her son. And she is grateful to you, for- I think if we make it clear to her how important it is, we can count on her discretion.”

“That’s the lot then, if you think you can trust the servants. Except-”

“Except?”

“Robert Read is sharp as a needle, he’s an inveterate gossip and I don’t trust your Edmund to keep him sweet.”

Lady Allingham- Clem- closed her eyes wearily.

“Oh, that just isn’t fair. The idea that _we_ should have to hide while they parade themselves around without a hint of shame-!”

“It’s the only way to be sure. But he won’t be much trouble. He doesn’t always come down from London when Edmund and Harry and I do. We’ll have plenty of time to ourselves.”

“You really think it will be all right?”

“I think if we two can’t keep an affair quiet there’s no one in the country who could.”

“Well then.” She squeezed his shoulders and leaned down to murmur into his ear. “Come to my bedroom after dinner.”

* * *

Sex by appointment. Bairstow honestly didn’t know what else he’d been expecting. Hell, for all he knew it was the way they always did things here in the Big House. Before he blew his brains out old Lord Allingham and his wife slept in separate rooms. All the same, there was something off-putting about it, coming up to knock on her door, still in evening dress. He felt off balance, self-conscious, like he’d come for a job interview. He found himself smoothing down his hair, as if it might have been tousled into disarray when he made his way up the stairs. Ridiculous.

Maybe it was just the unfamiliarity of it, taking a new lover after all this time. He hadn’t thought of it until now- Agnes Scrivener wasn’t the sort of girl you did think of, much- but he’d been with her longer than he had with anyone. Nigh on seven years they’d been together, and Bairstow hadn’t slept with anyone since. It was too much trouble to stop in the village for the night now that he was living up at Allingham Hall. Polly the housemaid had let be it known she possessed a certain moral flexibility on certain topics, but he’d never liked her. He wasn’t desperate enough to fuck her just for the sake of having a warm body near.

But he couldn’t remember feeling like this around a woman before, not even as a lad. He’d never courted a girl whose good opinion he was afraid to lose. It wasn’t worth the bother, not when there were girls like Agnes who thought so little of themselves that he was bound to stand tall by comparison. The ones who thought highly of themselves- the Norma Hankins and Martha Allinghams of the world- were always asking after things: money, time, a ring. But a girl like Agnes didn’t have exacting standards. No family to speak of, sweetheart dead in the war, nothing to look forward to but a lifetime of drudgery at a job that was slowly killing her- a few crumbs of male attention had been enough for her, until she’d fallen pregnant.

He thought himself so clever to steer clear of the trap, laughed at all the heartsick lovers and the henpecked husbands behind his hand. And look at him now.

It didn’t seem likely Clem Allingham would be satisfied with what contented Agnes Scrivener. Bairstow thought he was good enough in bed, but what man didn’t? They couldn’t all be above average. Agnes seemed to like it well enough, but she didn’t have a basis for comparison. Even now she didn’t have a basis of comparison, being married to Gilbert Hankin.

Still, the night wasn’t getting any younger, and there came a point where the only way out was through. He knocked.

She was taking her hair down when he came in. She pulled out the final pin and shook it loose, and it tumbled down over her shoulders in a waterfall of white gold. Somehow he hadn’t expected that, hadn’t entertained the possibility. She was always so perfectly coifed that he had come to see it as her natural state. She looked different like this, not younger exactly but taken out of herself, as if the Lady Allingham he knew was just a narrow facet of some greater Clem.

“Nervous? It’s not like you to linger in a doorway,” she said.

“Just unsure of the protocol. I’ve never been in a lady’s bedroom before.”

“You’ll find the relevant bits all work the same way.” She extended a hand to him, and he came to her and took it up. She folded his hand in hers.

“Do you know the one consolation about the plague of scandals that has descended on my family in recent months? Nothing that happens inside this room can possibly be as mortifying as the things that have happened outside it.”

“Reassuring.”

She laughed. “I take my comfort where I can find it, these days. Now come to bed.”


End file.
